#WeToo

The Women’s Marches and the #MeToo and Time’sUp movements have reenergized the commitment to women’s rights. For decades, women scholars at Rutgers have been ardent advocates. They have seen the progress made—and the progress yet to come.

(left to right): Suzanne Kim, Rutgers Law School; Gail A. Caputo, Camden College of Arts and Sciences; Deborah Gray White, School of Arts and Sciences; Leslie M. Kantor, School of Public Health; Kelly Dittmar, Camden College of Arts and Sciences; Debbie Walsh, Eagleton Institute of Politics; Dana Britton, School of Management and Labor Relations; Judy Postmus, School of Social Work; Gloria A. Bachmann, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Nancy DiTomaso, Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick; and Melissa Upreti, School of Arts and Sciences. View a video of the making of the magazine cover for the Spring 2018 issue.

Photography:

Bill Cardoni

Story by

Leslie Garisto Pfaff

The first number to break a record was 45. That was the tally of women officially running for governor as of early April 2018, the largest female gubernatorial field in U.S. history (the record had been 34, set in 1994). That number is now up to 77 candidates. Then, a week later, another record was eclipsed when the number of women announcing their candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives reached 309 (surpassing the 2012 record of 298). That number is now up to 476 candidates. To date, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, 49 women are running for one of the 35 U.S. Senate seats up for grabs, a record that breaks the 2016 mark of 40. Overall, it’s been an exceptional season for women’s political activism, fueled by the 2016 presidential election and mounting anger over the sense that issues meaningful to women were being disregarded or disparaged. That outrage led to not only a surge in the number of female candidates, but also the 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches and the #MeToo and Time’sUp movements that shined a bright light on sexual harassment and assault. Because of these events, there is a palpable sense that things will never be the same in this country, that a threshold has been crossed. For decades, centers and institutes throughout Rutgers, and the researchers and scholars associated with these units, have been increasing the understanding of women’s issues and offering solutions across a spectrum of expertise, ranging from workplace injustices to health care and reproductive rights to domestic abuse and children’s welfare. Some of the prominent scholars and experts at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, Rutgers University–Newark, and Rutgers University–Camden explain the range of endeavors under way at the university aimed at improving the lives of women.

Political ActivismDebbie Walsh
Director, Center for American Women and Politics
Eagleton Institute of Politics

Following the presidential election of 2016, “there was a sense that elections themselves have real consequences on people’s lives, and there was a real fear that the policy areas that mattered to women would be in jeopardy.”
–DEBBIE WALSH

Political engagement among women may have spiked over the past year and a half, but it’s far from a new phenomenon, and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) has the numbers to prove it. The center has been tracking women in politics for nearly a half-century and encouraging their involvement with programs like Ready to Run, NEW Leadership, and Teach a Girl to Lead. Debbie Walsh acknowledges that the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump had special meaning for a large number of American women.

“There was a sense that elections themselves have real consequences on people’s lives, and there was a real fear that the policy areas that mattered to women”—among them health care, immigration, education, and the environment—“would be in jeopardy,” says Walsh GSNB’80 who is frequently quoted in leading national publications. CAWP’s research has shown that women tend to run for office when important policy issues come into play.

Will this latest wave of activism sweep women into office? Walsh is cautious, noting that a large percentage of women are running against incumbents, who have won more than 80 percent of the time over the past 50 years (95 percent in U.S. House of Representatives races). This year, however, the same forces that have motivated women to run could change those odds. Walsh cites state legislative races in Virginia in 2017, in which women were overwhelmingly running as challengers and yet won 30 percent of the seats.

If something similar happens nationwide, it could provide momentum for women to continue to run in growing numbers. “Success,” says Walsh, “begets more motivation.” But women candidates are still in the minority, representing, for example, only about 22 percent of the House field. That’s partly because this new wave of candidates is largely Democratic. To achieve real parity in political life, Walsh says, we need women from both parties to run—and to win. “My long-term hope,” she says, “is that all of this will start to inspire more Republican women as well to run for office.”

Violence Against WomenJudy Postmus
Founding Director, Center on Violence
Against Women and Children
School of Social Work

Suzanne Kim
Professor of Law and Judge Denny Chin Scholar
Rutgers Law School in Newark

“Women don’t report for fear of repercussion or law-enforcement involvement, or because they’re ashamed, or because they don’t recognize that what they’re experiencing is abuse.”
–JUDY POSTMUS

In 2015, a Rutgers University–New Brunswick survey of college students piloted by a White House Task Force garnered national publicity when it revealed that 20 percent of female college students at Rutgers–New Brunswick had experienced what the report described as unwanted sexual contact (and 24 percent of women reported being subjected to sexual violence at some point before college). At the time of its release, the Campus Climate Survey, compiled by the Center on Violence Against Women and Children, confirmed a widespread phenomenon on college campuses—and evident in the world at large. Over a lifetime, 1 in 6 American women will confront rape or attempted rape, and 1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse (defined as severe physical violence by a partner in an intimate relationship)—but these figures don’t tell the whole story. Although statistics show that rates of sexual violence and domestic abuse have dropped significantly since the 1990s, both are among the most underreported of crimes. “Women don’t report for fear of repercussion or law-enforcement involvement, or because they’re ashamed, or because they don’t recognize that what they’re experiencing is abuse,” says Judy Postmus.

In the area of domestic abuse, Suzanne Kim, a scholar of family law and social inequality, notes that there’s another stumbling block in the way of reporting this violence. “Social inequalities in the family as they relate to gender,” she says, “have long gone under-addressed due to legal and social concepts of family privacy.” The home has historically been considered the most private of arenas, and for many years the law was loath to intercede in activities that took place in the home, among the people who lived there. In addition, legal notions of privacy made it difficult for victims to report domestic abuse and thus to find legal recourse. For addressing these barriers in the law, Kim credits Sally Goldfarb, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Camden, for her groundbreaking work that led to the creation of the federal Violence Against Women Act, enacted in 1994.

“Social inequalities in the family as they relate to gender have long gone under-addressed due to legal and social concepts of family privacy.”
–SUZANNE KIM

#MeToo, Postmus points out, is also helping women to understand that they’re not alone and that abuse can take many forms. “Violence,” she says, “is on a continuum, from the more overt that everybody recognizes—being raped, getting a black eye—to the more covert”—emotional or psychological abuse, deliberate isolation, financial abuse, and rape within marriage, which wasn’t even considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993.

What all these forms of assault and abuse have in common is power. When men have more power than women—in the workplace or in a marriage—violence and abuse are more likely to occur. (Men also experience sexual violence and domestic abuse, but on a much smaller scale.) For Postmus and her colleagues at the Center on Violence Against Women and Children, fighting violence against women necessitates, at the very least, a two-pronged strategy, one being women’s increased political participation. “You shift the policies; you shift the laws; and you bring greater attention to these issues and hold people accountable,” she says. And you also encourage everyone to speak up when they witness or experience violence. She cites the work of Sarah McMahon SSW’97, GSNB’05, an associate professor at the School of Social Work and associate director of the center, who has been teaching witnesses to sexual violence, especially on college campuses, to speak up and get involved.

In the realm of domestic abuse, it’s important to remember that, in addition to women, there are two other large groups of victims and potential victims, children and the elderly, and they’re often incapable of advocating for themselves. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 1 in 7 children experienced some type of abuse or neglect in the last year, with the abuse by parents or caregivers taking many forms, including physical, emotional, and sexual. And, says Kim, “some estimates show that 1 in 10 elders have experienced some kind of abuse or neglect in the past year, running the gamut of physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, and financial abuse and neglect.” She notes that, as with all types of domestic abuse, these problems are exacerbated by a culture of silence, whereas a culture that encourages victims (and their advocates in the family) to speak up can help bolster legal and other efforts to redress abuse.

Leslie M. Kantor, formerly Planned Parenthood’s vice president of education who is now associated with the School of Public Health, is tackling the closely related issue of consent. She recently produced a series of videos aimed at teaching young people how to give, ask for, and understand consent in sexual situations, something she feels should be included in every high school and junior high sex education curriculum. That would go a long way, she says, to lowering the instance of date rape on college campuses and across the country.

“You would do a great disservice to low-income and underserved women by taking away their only source of health insurance [Medicaid].”
–GLORIA A. BACHMANN

National headlines continue to garner fear among women’s groups, such as the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, that Title X funding for family planning will continue to be withdrawn from clinicians who provide most standard forms of birth control and given to those who promote abstinence or natural family planning (commonly referred to as “the rhythm method”). The trend is part of concerted efforts to roll back women’s access to family planning and its associated health care services, embodied by support for defunding Planned Parenthood. These developments have made the work of certain Rutgers scholars, who understand the implications of curbing this availability, all the more urgent.

The greatest threat, however, may be geography (though race and socioeconomics play a significant role). If you’re a woman who’s white, financially stable, and insured, and live in a state that’s largely urban or suburban, you’re likely to have entrée to comprehensive health care and reproductive practitioners and services. If you’re not, you’re probably uninsured and already know that your access is limited.

Gloria A. Bachmann notes that 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas, but they’re served by only 10 percent of the nation’s physicians—and only 6 percent of America’s ob-gyns. “In these areas,” she says, “around 4,000 additional primary care physicians are needed to meet current health care needs.” Even with a sufficient supply of practitioners, health care for women living near and below the poverty line would still be in jeopardy. That’s because Medicaid—the joint state and federal program that pays for the health care of Americans with limited incomes (and for roughly half of all obstetric deliveries in the United States)—has been cut in some states and is in danger of even deeper cuts by the federal government. “You would do a great disservice to low-income and underserved women by taking away their only source of health insurance,” says Bachmann NCAS’70, RWJMS’72, an expert in obstetrics and gynecology.

“We see an increasing number of very restrictive pieces of legislation, particularly related to abortion but also family planning and funding for women’s health.”
–LESLIE M. KANTOR

When it comes to accessing family planning services, the crucial differential is likely to be the state you live in. “We see an increasing number of very restrictive pieces of legislation, particularly related to abortion but also family planning and funding for women’s health, in many of the Republican-controlled states,” says Leslie M. Kantor. Both women see the solution to this disparity as a marathon rather than a sprint (Kantor calls it “a slog”). And despite the challenges imposed by the current health care climate, from restrictive legislation to the cost of caring for underserved populations on limited hospital budgets, Rutgers is committed to maintaining high standards of health care delivery among its affiliated teaching hospitals. To underscore the need for quality maternal care in New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Jersey Medical School, and their partners initiated the country’s first Maternal Health Awareness Day, which will occur annually on January 23, to educate New Jersey’s health care providers about the critical need to take women’s pregnancy concerns seriously. Like #MeToo and Time’sUp, says Bachmann, the program’s ultimate goal is “empowering women and making sure their voices are heard.”

Sexual HarassmentKelly Dittmar
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Camden College of Arts and Sciences

“The question now is, will we have the energy and political capital to address sexual harassment in substantive ways, and are we willing to grapple with the nuances and challenges that come with accountability and changing the culture?”
–KELLY DITTMAR

In 1991, when attorney Anita Hill accused then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her while he was her boss at two federal government agencies, sexual harassment certainly wasn’t anything new. But Hill’s testimony, taking place in such a high-profile public setting, engendered a broader cultural awareness of the problem and began a national conversation. Then, more than a quarter-century later, the issue exploded into the country’s consciousness as emboldened women came forth with accusations of harassment by well-known men such as Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer.

We’ve come a long way. “In 1991,” says Kelly Dittmar, also a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute, “we were just trying to define that there was such a thing.” Today, thanks in large part to the #MeToo and Time’sUp movements, few would argue that harassment is not widespread. The larger, still unanswered questions are how to define it and how to deal with it. Like violence against women and domestic abuse, Dittmar GSNB’12 notes, “it’s behavior that draws on a power imbalance.” And until that imbalance is rectified, the behavior isn’t likely to disappear altogether. Dittmar’s specific area of research addresses women in the political arena, who navigate male-dominated institutions ripe for this type of abuse. In her latest work, former high-level women on congressional staffs described the power allocated to them as a deterrent to potential harassers.

Because women are talking about harassment in raised voices, understanding of the behavior is also starting to change. Many women, for instance, who experienced unwanted sexual talk from male colleagues or superiors but who didn’t feel particularly threatened by it are only now beginning to understand that, yes, it constituted harassment. And men, too, are starting to question whether certain behaviors that felt harmless might actually have caused harm after all.

Dittmar believes that greater openness and awareness are already having a positive effect in the workplace, as human resource departments seek to educate their employees and create formal channels for reporting and punishing harassment and legislators discuss enacting laws to deal with the problem. Recalibrating that power differential will certainly go a long way toward creating lasting change. “The question now,” says Dittmar, “is will we have the energy and political capital to address sexual harassment in substantive ways, and are we willing to grapple with the nuances and challenges that come with accountability and changing the culture? Because those are the harder things.”

Rutgers has been working to keep the pressure on for continued change with a variety of events, among them a series of 2017 workshops, sponsored by the School of Management and Labor Relations, on preventing and investigating sexual harassment; a 2018 conference on the so-called masculinity crisis; and a speaking appearance, in February, by #MeToo founder Tarana Burke.

Injustices in the WorkplaceNancy DiTomaso
Distinguished Professor, Department of Management and Global Business
Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick

Dana Britton
Director, Center for Women and Work
School of Management and Labor Relations

“With each additional child, women are less likely to work full time, while having additional children has no effect on full-time work for fathers.”
-NANCY DiTOMASO

The dramatic strides women have made in the workforce can be seen in their increase from 33 percent of American workers in 1948 to 47 percent of the workforce in 2018. But a gender gap in both wages and authority remains. And although the gaps exist across virtually all occupations, the percentage of disparity is actually greatest for those in highly skilled, highly paid positions. (A noteworthy recent example is the pay differential for reshoots on the 2017 film All the Money in the World, for which its male star, Mark Wahlberg, received 1,000 times more than its female star, Michelle Williams.) Why a gap remains, and how to close it, are the subjects of research at both Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick and the Center for Women and Work at the School of Management and Labor Relations.

On average, for every dollar made by men, women make 80 cents—up from 62 cents in 1979 (although disparities are even greater for women of color). In part, says Nancy DiTomaso, that gap can be attributed to the types of jobs that women hold and the industries in which they work and the fact that those jobs are lower-paying overall. Women, for example, still predominate in fields like elementary school teaching and nursing while men make up more than 75 percent of the workforce in industries like construction and engineering. That’s changing—though the news isn’t all good. “Many more women have moved into traditional ‘men’s jobs,’ like business, than the opposite,” says Dana Britton. Unfortunately, “when occupations switch from majority male to majority female, wages tend to decline.” And when men do move into so-called women’s jobs, they tend to fare better in pay. In 2016, for instance, male registered nurses made 10 percent more than their female counterparts.

“Many more women have moved into traditional ‘men’s jobs,’ like business, than the opposite. When occupations switch from majority male to majority female, wages tend to decline.”
–DANA BRITTON

At the start of their careers, women experience a much smaller pay gap—between 4 and 7 percent. But as they progress, the disparity widens. DiTomaso attributes that, in part, to “a significant gap in women’s upward mobility into positions of authority, with fewer women proportionately at each greater level of responsibility in almost every industry.” When men are in charge, they tend to promote men over women for a variety of reasons, some of them fairly subtle. “At the C-suite level in corporations,” Britton observes, “personal networks still matter a lot, and women tend to be excluded from these networks.” And women charge that men tend to get the plum job assignments. “In a study that we did of scientists and engineers,” says DiTomaso, “we found that women were more likely to get advice while men were more likely to get opportunity—and opportunity is what mattered in how people were evaluated and likely to be promoted.” One of the most significant factors holding women back is the division of labor in the home. Child and elder care is likely to fall to the woman in a marriage, making women more likely to take time off from work, both for maternity leave and for the raising of young children. “With each additional child,” says DiTomaso, “women are less likely to work full time, while having additional children has no effect on full-time work for fathers.”

Potential remedies extend from expanding access to child care and encouraging fathers to take paternity leave—which would allow women to stay employed throughout their adult lives—to putting in place “results-only” policies (emphasizing the completion of tasks over hours spent at work) and training to make managers aware of unconscious bias in the treatment of women versus men. But for true job parity, we may need to see a deeper cultural change. “Until there is equality in the home,” DiTomaso says, “it isn’t likely that there will be equality in the labor force.”

The Changing Status of African-American WomenDeborah Gray White
Board of Governors Distinguished Professor, Department of History
Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies
School of Arts and Sciences

The growing Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the widespread misperception of black men as dangerous, and it is just starting to increase awareness that a prejudice of another kind follows black women. If you break up Americans by gender and ethnicity, for example, and look at the percentage of each group receiving some form of higher education, you may be startled by the results. Unless you’re an African-American woman. That’s because black women are enrolled in college at a higher percentage than any other group. For Deborah Gray White, that statistic offers reason for hope, but it also serves up a caveat: “Sometimes,” she says, “the more success you have, the more threatening you appear.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought national attention to the fact that African-American men may be perceived as threatening simply by wearing a hoodie, holding up an unidentified item that might (or might not) be a gun, or, yes, being black. But White, author of Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves; and other works of social and cultural history, notes that the movement was founded by African-American and LGBTQ women, and that those women are also perceived as threatening, if in slightly different ways: walk into a store, she says, and you might get taken for a potential shoplifter. Walk through your own workplace, and your coworkers might question your right to be there. Citing a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she raises the issue of “weathering: the daily minutiae that black women have to deal with in terms of racism”—weathering because it wears you down. And so those promising educational statistics have to be weighed against the realities of day-to-day life for African-American women: they suffer from a different set, and a disproportionate number, of health problems; they’re three times more likely than white women to die during pregnancy or childbirth, or both; and they’re much more likely to be single mothers (67 percent as opposed to 42 percent of Latinas and 25 percent of white women).

One way to correct those inequities is to keep them firmly in the public eye. And White is optimistic about the future, she says, “because these women have stepped up and said, ‘Hey, black lives matter, gay lives matter, they matter, and we’re going to bring it all to the table.’”

Improving the Lives of Women Around the WorldMelissa Upreti
Senior Director, Program and Global Advocacy Center
for Women’s Global Leadership
School of Arts and Sciences

From the deadly van attack on April 23 in Toronto by a member of the misogynistic “incel” (involuntarily celibate) community to the kidnapping of girls by the Boko Haram militants in Nigeria over the past four years, violence against women and girls continues to command international attention and condemnation. In fact, violence and poverty are two of the greatest threats to women around the globe, and in the case of violence, living in a high-income country doesn’t offer immunity. “Violence against women is a threat to women’s rights and advancement everywhere,” says Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer.

Globally, violence against women takes many forms: the flogging of women for adultery, the use of rape as a weapon of war, an acid attack by a spurned suitor. Compounding the problem, says Upreti, is the fact that “women are often made to feel ashamed and, even worse, blamed for what happens to them.”

Poverty and violence against women are intertwined, and poverty is a high risk factor for violence. Around the world, notes Upreti, “the burden of poverty is borne by women.” A pay gap between men and women exists virtually everywhere, but the bigger problem in low-income countries, Upreti explains, is that most women work in low-paying and informal sectors of their economies and aren’t fully protected by national labor laws or able to organize. Their experiences are similar to those of poor immigrant and minority women in advanced economies.

The Center for Women’s Global Leadership has played a major role in promoting awareness of violence against women internationally and securing women’s rights as human rights with global campaigns like the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, leadership institutes, and advocacy in the United Nations. “But if there’s one thing we’ve learned,” says Upreti, “it’s that public awareness of violence must be followed by legal accountability and more.” Women need economic empowerment, full recognition of their sexual and reproductive rights, and opportunities to mobilize. And it’s far from just a woman’s issue. “Countries that provide better access to women’s sexual and reproductive health services, respect their autonomy, ensure their legal rights, and provide access to justice,” says Upreti, “fare much better overall.”

Influencing the Attitudes of Young Men and WomenGail A. Caputo
Professor, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice;
Founding Director, Program in Gender Studies
Camden College of Arts and Sciences

“Students today have a different view of the world than even students I had 10 years ago.”
–GAIL A. CAPUTO

Raised in a society that still too often demeans women, in everything from their depiction in popular culture to their treatment in social media, young men and women are understandably confused by the mixed messages that bombard them as they’re developing their attitudes toward gender and sexuality. And Rutgers is responding to that confusion. In the fall of 2018, Rutgers–Camden will become the first college in the southern New Jersey region to offer a major in gender studies, a program that reflects not just the need to educate students about the roles that gender plays in our lives and our culture, but also the changing attitudes of a generation of young people. “Students today have a different view of the world than even students I had 10 years ago,” says Gail A. Caputo.

It’s significant that, during the planning process, the name of the major was changed from “Women’s and Gender Studies” to simply “Gender Studies,” since the program advances the field to include both queer studies and men’s studies. “It’s inclusive,” says Caputo UCN’89, SCJ’93, GSN’95. “It explores how each of us interacts with the world and how our particular identities—our gender, ability, religion, and so on—affect who we are, how we are viewed, what happens to us, how we think, and how we go about our lives.” Among other topics in the major will be how boys are socialized and the roles that sports and violence play in their lives. Caputo wants the program to accomplish more than just educate the students enrolled in it. “I hope we can give students the confidence, knowledge, and tools to interact with people in ways they never have, and to make change happen.”

Rutgers, Women, and the Future

In the years ahead, the centers and institutes at Rutgers, and their dedicated scholars and experts, will be an essential resource and a proponent of myriad solutions to vexing problems that affect women’s rights. Rutgers will be evaluating and analyzing, researching and teaching, and recommending and predicting—all in the name of facilitating an understanding of issues that are so important to women, and society, in promoting change. •